In Dreams
by kittodaijoubu
Summary: There are a lot of things Tezuka could blame this mess he’s in on." Tezuka in a moment of carelessness; the repercussions that follow. Tezuka/ Fuji.
1. Chapter 1

There are a lot of things Tezuka could blame this mess he's in on. It might have been the heady euphoria at winning Nationals, something Inui might've slipped into the drinks (he wouldn't put it past Inui to attempt to 'lighten him up' by creating some Super Inui Rabu-rabu Ready Juice Deluxe just for him), it might have been the light, translucently amber, a sepia-tinged wash. The same light filled Fuji's eyes with honey, outlined the angle of his cheekbone and the curve of his neck and his sharp collarbones, jutting out and barely visible

He remembers feeling warmth coiling in the base of his chest, a feeling he associated previously only with tennis, the feel of the shock reverberating up his arm as his racket contacts the ball with a _smack_, watching it skim the net and hit a precise spot on the baseline. The phantom feeling of a gold medal, weighing heavy and solid around his neck.

They walked home together after, because Fuji's house is only a few streets away from Tezuka's and Tezuka wasn't comfortable with the thought of Fuji walking home alone, tired from the day's handover ranking matches as he is. Fuji has never told him explicitly but he knows that there have been instances in trains, on buses, in alleys (Fuji tells Eiji and Eiji tells Oishi and Oishi tells him); he doesn't doubt that Fuji can take care of himself, but the slight shaking of Fuji's hands as he lifted the cup of green tea to his lips didn't escape his notice.

* * *

At the door of Fuji's house Fuji turns and touches him lightly on the elbow.

_Thank you, Tezuka. Would you like to come in? Yumiko's out with her boyfriend and Yuuta and my parents aren't at home at this time, usually. _

They go through this ritual regularly; Tezuka walks Fuji home, Fuji asks him to come in - though whether out of politeness or a real desire for his company, Tezuka doesn't speculate - and Tezuka always declines. In all his years with the Seigaku regulars he's never been to anyone's house but Oishi's, and the last because it was strictly necessary and nothing more.

Today, though, he says yes, and Fuji's eyes open wide in startlement before he smiles crookedly and turns to fumble with the lock. It evidently doesn't take much to surprise Fuji when one doesn't mean to.

Tezuka blinks. Fuji's eyes are full of light again, the moon and the streetlamps mingling, reflecting. This is an important moment to remember; this is a point of reference for Tezuka.

Fuji kicks his shoes off and leaves them haphazardly where they land, toes pointing in different directions. It isn't his house but it still pains Tezuka, who neatly aligns his shoes perpendicular to the door, parallel to each other. When he's sure Fuji has walked off down the hallway he nudges them into some semblance of order.

The cactus on the hallway table seems to either be staring at him in bemused horror or sniggering at his obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

_Tea? _Fuji calls dulcetly down the hallway. His house is tidy and looks lived-in the way Tezuka's does not, scuffmarks on the floor and sweaters draped over chairs and papers scattered over tables.

_If it's not any trouble,_ calls back Tezuka.

Fuji reappears at the door of the kitchen balancing a tray with two cups and a plate of biscuits. The steam from the tea wafts its way over to Tezuka in languid tendrils, forming a curious sort of white halo effect around Fuji's head. They pad up the stairs in their socked feet, pausing only for Fuji to point out and coo over Yuuta's topless baby picture on the wall (a devious glint of the eyes accompanies the announcement, _if he ever becomes famous I'm going to auction it off on eBay. Alternatively I could just send copies anonymously to every girl in school on his birthday_, and Tezuka thanks his stars again that he doesn't have siblings)and for Tezuka to carefully manuever around one of Fuji's more prickly cactus specimens, left (decoratively, insists Fuji) near the side-edge of a step.

Fuji's room is not the explosion of chaos Tezuka subconsciously expected; instead there are even rows of cacti arranged on the windowsill and all the clothes present are nicely and crisply folded at the foot of the bed. What does confuse him is the shelf full of _Hanakimi_ manga and Hana Yori Dango DVDs; as does the presence of several NEWS and Arashi and (most horrifyingly) KAT-TUN. In a bid to pretend ignorance he takes off his glasses, ostensibly to clean them but more to avoid seeing anything else horrifying, like the Kama Sutra -- which he'd actually already seen at Oishi's house (Oishi had blushed an unattractive shade of brilliant scarlet and stammered that Kikumaru had bought it for him thinking it was a book on Zen meditation; but he isn't very good at lying and anyway Tezuka is far less obtuse and prudish than everyone thinks him).

His temporary loss of vision, however, means that when he turns around he finds himself chest-to-nose with Fuji, who nearly drops the cup of tea he is proffering in surprise.

This is the part where everything is unclear; he remembers looking down at Fuji, searching and unsmiling and unsure, before leaning down and awkwardly pressing his lips against Fuji's. Fuji doesn't yield softly and gently like girls are supposed to, doesn't do anything at all except maybe open his mouth a little in a slight 'o' of surprise. The nape of his neck is a warm curve against Tezuka's palm.

It takes Fuji dropping the cup of tea to break them out of it. The sharp noise makes them spring apart and Fuji wipes his mouth with the back of his hand before looking at Tezuka. For once he isn't smiling at all, and the tilt of his chin is defiantly challenging.

Before he can say anything, Tezuka bolts. _Bang_, goes the door.

The tea seeps slowly over the floor, a stain spreading from the centre outwards, inching towards Fuji's feet like the tide coming in.

* * *

He is walking down a street towards the school when he passes a pregnant figure in an empire-line dress the exact shades of blue and white on the Seigaku regular's jersey. The blue's an unusual enough colour that he has to turn around to look at it; even from the back the silhouette is familiar, wispy brown hair and pixie-delicate angularity -

_Fuji?_

The person turns from the shop window, full of (Tezuka notes with mingling dismay and satisfaction) miniaturised tennis equipment.

_Ah, Tezuka. I was wondering when you would find out. _Fuji smiles, seemingly unperturbed by the fact that he is standing in broad daylight, in public, a boy with curves where there shouldn't be

_This is physically impossible,_ he tells Fuji. _We didn't --You're a boy and I pay attention in Biology class and you're --_

_Ah, but Tezuka, you're only fifteen, what do you know of impossibilities? _Fuji walks over, slides his arms around Tezuka's neck and leans in so close that Tezuka could count the faint sprinkling of freckles across the bridge of his nose if he wanted to.

An elderly couple walks past and smiles indulgently at them; a motorcycle goes past and someone shouts - in Momoshiro's voice - _hey, buchou, get a room_!

(Tezuka makes a mental note to make Momoshiro run a hundred and thirty laps at their next tennis practice session.)

_S'not like you're in any position to talk about physical impossibility either. Just think about it. _Fuji's breath is warm on Tezuka's ear, his voice raw silk and ricepaper._ The Tezuka Zone? It isn't everyone who can do that, you know. _

Tezuka wants to say something about taking responsibility and appropriate decorum and public displays of affection but that gets lost along the way somewhere in the hollow at the base of his throat; before he knows it he's kissing Fuji in the middle of the street, in full view of anyone and everyone.

To his surprise Fuji draws away after a while and looks at him, eyes open and alight with meaning, and says simply, _So what are you going to do about it?_

Tezuka tries to form a coherent reply but the only thing that comes out of his mouth is _twenty laps_ -- and there is a moment of silence, when Fuji's mouth briefly twists into a bitter line before settling into a smile of resigned sadness. _I see_. He walks away, dignified despite the unreality of his physique, and though Tezuka wants to say _no, stop_ and run after him there is suddenly a rising chorus of _buchou, buchou_ behind him and he is torn between the team that needs him and going after Fuji and it feels like he is being torn apart but --

* * *

-- Tezuka jerks awake and looks at the clock beside his bed, the colon in the _2:29_ blinking serenely at him.

Sometimes he almost wishes he was a normal teenage boy, with _normal dreams_ for that age demographic -- but then again normal teenage boys don't usually have the word _demographic_ in their vocabulary.

Tezuka stares up at the blank ceiling, hoping for some kind of answer to appear, maybe a message from the tennis powers that be. When it appears there are none forthcoming he pulls his blanket miserably over his head and closes his eyes. This is what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a Zero-Shiki, wondering what to do about the ball that rolls casually to a stop and waits silently at his feet, the outcome of his own creation, his own doing.

Somewhere at the back of his mind, a little voice says snarkily, _mada mada dane, Tezuka-buchou._

* * *

Echizen never quite understands why Tezuka makes him run a record hundred and twenty laps for being merely three minutes late for the next practice.


	2. Chapter 2

Tezuka watches Fuji disappear into the clubroom during practice and wonders when the slant and fall of his fringe became so familiar.

His brief inattention is enough for things to become chaotic, as junior high boys left alone is an action akin to leaving a lighted match in the hands of a compulsive serial arsonist. Momo trips over his shoelace and falls into Inui, who is holding a particularly noxious concoction in a conical flask that does nothing to hide either its lurid, shifting colours or the fumes emanating from it, and who loses balance and spills it onto Kaidoh.

Silence falls over the court, partly because Tezuka's expression does not bode well for anyone involved and mostly because Inui's compound appears to have the potency of concentrated sulphuric acid and appears to be eating a smoking hole right through the elbow of Kaidoh's regular jersey.

Kaidoh chooses to ignore Inui's role in all this and goes straight for Momo, grabbing him by the collar; the impact of this forces them to stumble backwards, and - Tezuka is sure he closed his eyes in pained anticipation, here - crash into Fuji, just emerging from the clubroom.

The only thing Tezuka can think of is how similar the expression of startled bemusement he is wearing now is to that evening's.

* * *

They've managed to get Fuji over to sit on the bench, an honour he acknowledges with a faint, wry quirk of the lips. Ryuuzaki-sensei is at a teachers' meeting, which leaves Tezuka to do the honours of administering first aid (he doesn't trust the first-years enough, and he certainly doesn't want his Singles Two player coming down with gangrene and losing his leg from knee-down)

His fingertips are dry and slightly rough; there are inkstains smeared faintly and at random over them (this is the hazard of smoothing out completed homework with damp hands). He knows they are lingering too long but not why; the iodine is staining his fingers yellow-brown ochre, a single drop escaping the gauze and pooling between his second and third fingers. The moments of carelessness continue to tally up.

Already the scrape is beginning to scab over at the edges, the surface wrinkling like pahoehoe lava: the still-molten subsurface flow under a congealing top.

_Nothing to worry about, Tezuka. I've seen worse on Yuuta as a five year old, he used to fall a lot in the playground, you know_. Tezuka looks at Fuji over the rims of his lenses, notes the crease at the corner of his mouth that is trying to be one half of a smile belying his heroic dismissal, and cannot help but try to be gentler.

_You think about him a lot._ That's never been a question, but Tezuka can see where it might start to be a problem. They've had this conversation before in a hallway, over the pretext of a borrowed English dictionary that had post-it tabs sticking out at the important pages, little purple and blue and green rectangles, scraps of paper with Tezuka's neat penmanship listing synonyms.

Fuji ducks his head, averts his face. _Saa, maybe. _

When Tezuka finishes taping down the gauze he stands abruptly, brushing off his knees. He looks down at Fuji's neatly-bandaged shin and says the only thing he can: _Don't let your guard down_. The unsaid _again_ is implicit, and Fuji raises his eyes to Tezuka's and replies impishly, _Of course, buchou._

It takes Tezuka the rest of practice to realise that Fuji has never actually called him _buchou _before.

* * *

After practice, Fuji smilingly deflects everyone's concern, waves them all off to their own after-school pursuits. Kikumaru lingers, unwilling to leave his best friend; but Fuji tips his chin gently in the direction of the bus stop and says, _Oishi's waiting for you. You shouldn't make him worry any more than he already does. _

Tezuka emerges from the clubroom to find Fuji ensconced quietly on the bench, idly toeing at a brown leaf trailing weakly on the ground, dragged along by the spring breeze.

_You should've gone home._

_By myself, Tezuka? _Fuji opens his eyes, wide and guileless. _Aren't you worried I might be suffering from severe internal bleeding and collapse on the way home?_

_You and I both know that you aren't, Fuji, and you told everyone else you were fine even though Momoshiro offered to give you a lift home on the back of his bike._ Tezuka is proud of himself for keeping the edge out of his tone; it's been a trying enough week, and the dream he's had haunts him enough that every time he looks over at Fuji he expects him to resemble a blimp in an oversized jersey.

Still, the residual guilt from that evening is enough for him to stay in step with Fuji until they get to the road junction where they usually part. It's been a silent walk, which is not unusual for him but is for Fuji, who usually finds something to comment on: be it the applicability of probability in daily life (illustrated by the frequency of alternating ice-cream and takoyaki stands on every street corner) or the curious dimple at Tezuka's left elbow, visible only when he holds his racket loosely while waiting for an opponent's serve.

Tezuka feels strangely cheated at not being able to acquiesce to things, as he usually does.

* * *

At the road junction Fuji finally says something, tilting his head to the right as he does, as if it's a query.

_You know, you don't always need to look up to see the sky._ Fuji points at a fragment of mirror on the road, glinting silver and filled with shifting blue and white.

Were he the superstitious sort this is what Tezuka would have replied: _Broken mirrors mean seven years' bad luck._ Instead he says, _Someone might drive over that_.

Fuji waits for the lights to change, then limps (rather exaggeratedly, thinks Tezuka, not used to seeing Fuji doing anything in excess) out to retrieve the shard.

_Always so civic-minded, Tezuka._ He shrugs one shoulder easily, the motion like a ripple across a lake. _Here._

Fuji grabs Tezuka's hand and deposits the piece of glass into it, carefully placing it in the cupped hollow of the palm so that Tezuka doesn't get cut by the edges. Then he runs off (in spite of his injury), turning back after twenty paces to flutter his fingers cheerily; leaving Tezuka standing alone on the pavement with a handful of sky.

* * *

The glass is a cold strip across his palm, clean lines and unequal angles. Tezuka curls his fingers (one by one) around it carefully and sticks his hand into his coat pocket.

He's not sure if this is forgiveness or a promise, it could be both; and it is enough for now.


End file.
